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The Option of Cloud Computing

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1. INTRODUCTION With the rapid development of processing and storage technologies and the success of the Internet, computing resources have become cheaper, more powerful and more ubiquitously available than ever before. This technological trend has enabled the realization of a new computing model called cloud computing, in which resources (e.g., CPU and storage) are provided as general utilities that can be leased and released by users through the Internet in an on-demand fashion. In a cloud computing environment, the traditional role of service provider is divided into two: the infrastructure providers who manage cloud platforms and lease resources according to a usage-based pricing model, and service providers, who rent resources from one or many infrastructure providers to serve the end users. The emergence of cloud computing has made a tremendous impact on the Information Technology (IT) industry over the past few years, where large companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft strive to provide more powerful, reliable and cost-efficient cloud platforms, and business enterprises seek to reshape their business models to gain benefit from this new paradigm. Indeed, cloud computing provides several compelling features that make it attractive to business owners, as shown below. No up-front investment: Cloud computing uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model. A service provider does not need to invest in the infrastructure to start gaining benefit from cloud computing. It simply

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